1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally a powered post or station at which a portable truck is positioned for material take-up or supply operations, and more particularly to such a post at which the take-up or supply truck is automatically aligned with the post, and take-up or supply members mounted on the truck are automatically horizontally and vertically aligned with drive elements on the post.
2. History of Related Art
Portable trucks are commonly used in various manufacturing operations for the take-up and subsequent transportation of sheet materials, or the delivery and supply of sheet materials to a processing station. In particular, portable trucks are used in the tire manufacturing industry to take-up sheets of rubber plies from a ply processing station, and winding the ply on a roll with a fabric separator provided from a second roll on the truck. In this application, it has heretofore been necessary to carefully position the truck with respect to a drive post which provides a drive mechanism and a brake arrangement for the respective rolls on the truck. This has required that the truck be manually positioned in appropriate relationship with the post, the wheels of the truck dogged or chocked to prevent movement, and then the shafts of each of the rolls individually aligned with drive couplings, or chucks, provided on the post. Moreover, the rolls are typically carried on square end shafts which separately engage a respective coupling on the post. Thus, the shaft of each of the rolls must be individually aligned with a socket provided in each of the drive couplings. Not only has this procedure been very labor intensive, but has sometimes resulted in injury, such as pinched fingers, muscle strain, etc., to the person connecting the portable truck to the stationery post.
In a copending application, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/218,486 filed Dec. 22, 1998 by the inventor of the present invention, titled AUTOMATIC WINDING POST, an automatic winding post is disclosed which addresses many of the above problems, but does not have vertical adjustability. As the wheels on a portable truck wear, and the vertical position of the truck mounted components move to an elevationally lower position. If the wheel wear becomes significant, the elevational position of the truck-mounted roll shafts may not be able to vertically align with the post-mounted chucks.
The present invention is directed to overcoming the problems set forth above. It is desirable to have a post, or station, to which a portable truck can be operatively connected without any alignment effort on the part of a person delivering the hand truck to the powered post. It is also desirable to have such a post that automatically positions the portable truck at a desired position with respect to the post. Furthermore, it is desirable to have such a post that is automatically alignable, both vertically and horizontally, with respect to roller shafts mounted on the truck and has chucks which automatically align themselves with a square-end shaft of the truck rolls.